2 days ago
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Almost a year after teasing an AI-powered "Ask Photos" feature for its Photos app, Google says the feature still isn't quite ready.
An official rollout has been going on since October, but Google says it's pausing the current rollout at least two weeks while it works out some bugs.
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If you're not familiar, the feature helps you find certain photos or bits of information by asking Gemini. For example, you might ask, "Where did we camp the last time we went to Yosemite?" or "Find selfies I took in museums on my trip to New York." The feature wasn't exactly reliable, though, often missing photos that were in the folder and running painfully slow at times.
Responding to complaints on X, Jamie Aspinall, product manager for Google Photos, said, "Ask Photos isn't where it needs to be, in terms of latency, quality and ux. Rollout has been paused at very small numbers while we address these issues. In ~2 weeks we'll ship an improved version that brings back the speed and recall of the original search." Aspinall didn't explain specifically how Google was addressing these problems.
ZDNET senior editor Sabrina Ortiz tested Ask Photos earlier this year and had similar complaints about the speed and limited overall capability. In her words, the feature has promise, but as it stands, "'Ask Photos' actually made Google Photos worse."
This isn't Google's only AI product to run into problems. Its AI Overviews feature has been notoriously unreliable, whether it was recommending wildly unsafe recipes like glue pizza or creating fake origin stories for fictitious sayings.
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If you do have the Ask Photos feature, it's not hard to go back to the old way. You can either temporarily do so by clicking "Switch to classic search" on the Ask page or turn it off permanently by clicking on your profile picture in the upper right-hand corner of the Photos app, going to Settings, then Preferences, and lastly, Gemini features in Google Photos. From there, you'll see a "Search with Ask Photos" toggle.
Since Google hasn't issued an official statement other than the X post, I've reached out for more information.
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